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Welcome to my spot on the Beauty of the Wolf blog tour. Wray Delaney is a pen name for author Sally Gardner. I’ve read both Maggot Moon and Tinder – her “retellings” of the moon landing and the fairytale The Tinderbox.

In Beauty of the Wolf she tackles Beauty and the Beast with a gender twist, faeries and an Elizabethan setting. Sounds marvellous, and just feast your eyes on this beautiful hardcover 😍.

Synopsis

‘What some might call beauty, I find monstrous’

In the age of the Faerie Queene, Elizabeth I, Lord Francis Rodermere starts to lay waste to a forest.

Furious, the sorceress who dwells there scrawls a curse into the bark of the first oak he fells:

A faerie boy will be born to you whose beauty will be your death.

Ten years later, Lord Rodermere’s son, Beau is born – and all who encounter him are struck by his great beauty.

Meanwhile, many miles away in a London alchemist’s cellar lives Randa – a beast deemed too monstrous to see the light of day.

And so begins a timeless tale of love, tragedy and revenge…

A stunning retelling of Beauty and the Beast

Beauty of the Wolf is out now, and if your appetite for Beauty and the Beast retellings has been whet, you might like to check out the following too. I appear to have a number of them – not all read yet.

Books

The Original by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve (1740)(not yet read 😱) – this edition designed by MinaLima has interactive pages and is a work of beauty.

A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) /A Court of Mist and Fury (ACOMAF) by Sarah J Maas – ACOMAF has to be one of my favourite books of all time and the first and the second books in this series are loosely inspired by B&tB with Faeries making the perfect beasts.

A Curse so Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer – a contemporary YA fantasy with a human girl sucked into a world where a Prince is cursed to relive his 18th year and turn into a beast every autumn. This is a recent release, and first in a series.

Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge (not yet read) – our beauty in this one is betrothed to an evil ruler and has been trained to kill him. Will she?

The Beast’s Heart by Leife Shallcross (not yet read) – this one is told from the Beast’s point of view and reviews suggest he is extremely sympathetic in this version.

Disney

2017 Film novelisation (Read)

Lost in a Book by Jennifer Donnelly (Read) – story centred on an adventure with the magical book that appears in the 2017 film.

As Old As Time (not yet read) is part of the Twisted Tales series and has the tagline – What if Belle’s mother cursed the beast?

The Beast Within (not yet read) is part of the Villains Tales series focusing on the Beast.

Film/TV

Disney animation (1991) – Belle is my favourite Disney Princess and every bookworm I know just wants the Beast’s library, and a number prefer the cartoon beast to the cartoon human. Plus Chip is the cutest teacup ever.

Beauty and the Beast TV series (1987 – 1990) – I was in love with this series as a teen. Linda Hamilton of Terminator fame starred as Catherine who finds romance with Vincent (Ron Perlman) who lives below the city in the sewers.

Beauty and the Beast TV Series (2012-2016) – Smallville’s Kristin Kreuk is a detective who falls for an ex-soldier hiding from the government who experimented on him. I started this series and really enjoyed it. Must watch the rest.

I’ve been thinking about customising my blog further for a while now and have been very jealous of other book bloggers’ gorgeous headers. Although I’m fairly creative I have very little artistic talent and knew I wouldn’t be able to do justice to creating a header so I decided to commission someone to do it for me.

There are a lot of brilliant artists in the book community but I was drawn to the work of @taratjah the most. Her work on drawing Rhysand from A Court of Thorn and Roses series, especially toddler Rhysand was the style I was after. Check out all the merch I bought from her Redbubble site (along with the bookmark I purchased from @Behindthe_Pages and the Rhysand custom FunkoPop I made).

I approached Tara through her tumblr page and luckily for me she had some commission slots opening up.

This is what I asked for:

I’m thinking of a cartoony imagining of a little me (I’ll attach a picture of when I was sweet) sat amongst books, reading one with magic things coming out of it and going on around it, magical feather, spells, pens, wands – some sort of subtle nods to Harry Potter and Rhysand in there. Happy to let you go wild. It would need to have my blog name maybe at the bottom which is Books, Occupation…Magic! and maybe the letters Kirstyes floating somewhere in the magic.
Does that sound feasible?

Here was the picture – (no, I don’t know what went wrong either!!)

Tara was brilliant at communicating throughout the process and to be honest I would have been happy if she’d had stopped at the line art stage!!!

As you can see the final image doesn’t have the letters ‘kirstyes’ in it (I trusted Tara’s judgement that it would have looked odd). Instead she added some musical notes to indicate my love of Musicals. When the final image came through it was perfect and I did feel tears welling. With Tara’s permission I will be getting a canvas and maybe some bookmarks printed. I love the Stars and Mountains and Wings nods to Rhysand and the Quill, Wand, Snitch and Timeturner. And little me in my school uniform (or Hufflepuff uniform ;o) reading and writing away. Actually, I simply love it all.

You can see the image active as my header (and avatar and on my facebook pages and Twitter profile) but here it is again in all its glory. As you can probably tell I would highly recommend Tara and her rates, for when she is open to commissions, are clearly indicated on her tumblr account).

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Book Ratings

I use Goodreads for my Reviews and follow this rating scale:

5 stars - It was Amazing (It struck a cord with me emotionally, is one I would read again, watch the movie etc etc. It gets added to my favourite list - this list may be quite long).4 stars - Really Liked It (I will recommend it to others and would be more than happy to read again)3 stars - Liked it (I enjoyed it enough and may read it again but it didn't fully grab me)2 stars - It was OK (Probably won't read it again or recommend it)1 star - I didn't like it (Very unlikely to read again, may have wanted to stop reading but usually I plow through)

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